


no angel in you in the end

by elliptical



Series: unbecoming jordan hennessy [3]
Category: Dreamer Trilogy - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Character Study, Drug Use, Gen, Hennessy Is Her Own Content Warning, Substance Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:14:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28058247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elliptical/pseuds/elliptical
Summary: At one point, when she thought too hard about this, she suddenly found herself standing in the bedroom with blood dripping down her knuckles.  Three ragged holes gaped in the plaster wall.  Madox couldn’t remember putting them there, but her heart sang like she had, and that was proof enough.
Series: unbecoming jordan hennessy [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2052732
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	no angel in you in the end

Madox awoke with a hole inside her.

She thought, at first, that she’d been shot. And then she thought that she’d been burned. Her clothes had melted onto her third-degree flesh, and she’d die before the paramedics arrived. She’d read somewhere, though, that bad enough burns didn’t hurt at all. The nerves died, forever incapable of transmitting agony.

She thought she’d read it somewhere, at least. Someone had read it.

When the burn didn’t abate, she revised her theory to poison. Certainly acid rolled in her stomach and coated her throat. Certainly she’d been struck by sickness.

And then she identified the soul-blackening rage that flickered at her ribs. It was a living creature: symbiotic, parasitic, a curious oxymoron. The anger ate her alive, and it chewed at her insides, and it begged to ruin all that she was, and it felt _good._

It felt so fucking good. Not only good, like a pleasant afternoon breeze - it felt _right,_ holy, like scratching at a stubborn itch until the blood flowed free. 

Madox let the monster work.

For the first year of her newly-minted life, she found creative outlets for the rage. These mostly centered on her father and the also-newly-minted Evil Stepmother Jen. Bill Dower was a negligent asshole at best, but his fresh-out-of-college Barbie wife was worse. Not that her behavior was more malevolent, exactly. In fact, the arguable opposite was true. She pretended to _care_ , trying to bond and embrace and discipline and nurture and support - at least until her boredom set in. She enjoyed parental responsibility only when Jordan Hennessy proved an entertaining pet. Once her personal enthusiasm faded, she returned to her most reliable pastime. She drank and smoked herself into an unfeeling stupor on the couch, and Jordan or June had to coax her into bed, and she barely moved for days. 

That was the greatest sin of all, in Madox’s opinion: You were either up-front about your shortcomings, or you committed to your impossible promises. There was no honorable middle ground.

Jen never pretended that she would improve. She never promised to try harder. She never acknowledged her faults at all. After all, nobody could be more inconsistent than Jay, even if Madox didn’t remember her. Jen had been regaled with so many tales of Bill’s crazy ex; the parenting bar was already on the ground. The evil stepmother was too lazy to dig below.

“We could almost be related,” Hennessy said once, snidely, across the dinner table - and Jen burst into hiccuping tears. Not even despairing or frustrated waterworks; the stupid bitch thought her stepdaughter had paid a compliment.

Part of Madox took pleasure in murder fantasies about their parents, so she knew that Hennessy did too. Hennessy’s impulse control circled the drain just like Madox’s. Hennessy’s anger curled her hands into the same fists.

For her part, Madox understood that killing the assholes would land one of them behind bars. Or worse, they’d all walk away clean, and then Jordan Hennessy would be shipped to a foster home, where it would be impossible to hide the extra cargo. The four of them would draw straws for who got to play the actual Jordan Hennessy. The losers would decay on the streets. Hennessy would die without Jordan and June to steady her, and then there’d be eternal sleep for all involved. 

Madox knew this. So did Hennessy.

For a brief time, in the eighteen months before Farrah, Madox became Hennessy’s best friend. She and Hennessy got along better than either of them did with June or Jordan. The girls were godawful together, as one might expect. Adolescent shenanigans abounded. Trouble was sought, havoc wrought. They both became a primary cause of Jordan and June’s tension headaches.

Madox didn’t feel guilty about that. If the other two would mind their own fucking business, they’d open fewer ulcers. But consequences for Hennessy were consequences for all of them, or what-fucking-ever. Madox paid no mind to the lectures.

Hennessy and Madox ground laxatives into their stepmother’s morning smoothie. They gifted her favorite necklace to the neighborhood squirrel. They added so much bleach to her laundry that holes peppered the designer clothes like artillery fire. They flushed ten of her Xanax down the toilet, so she wouldn’t notice the absence until too late. They laughed at the mental image of her sweaty skin and hyperventilated breaths as the benzo withdrawal hit. 

Madox suggested selling the drugs to some of the assholes at the high school, but Hennessy shut her down. Too much work for too little payout, she said. She was right, of course - a well-placed forgery would net more income than a month’s worth of pawned pills. Most teenagers didn’t have hard cash to burn. Art collectors did.

All the same, the refusal surprised Madox, given that Hennessy rarely shied from stupid self-destruction. It was much later that she realized Hennessy had been trying to protect Jordan, since Jordan was the only one of them who actually _went_ to school. And for some reason, that realization made Madox angry enough to smash all the front windows of their hideous Pennsylvania house.

_Vandals,_ everyone said, _and lucky you weren’t home._ Madox would never suffer consequences. When she’d hurled the bricks, the neighbors across the street were at work, and trees separated the McMansion’s lawn from the houses on either side. Hennessy herself was driving one of Bill’s old cars around the empty racetrack despite her un-legal age of fourteen, and Bill was watching and whooping and hollering, “We’ll make a pro of you yet!”

How could that girl have committed the crime? She’d never left her father’s sight. A perfect alibi.

June created fake IDs for the four of them. She’d gotten quite good at official documents, licenses, bank statements - all the types of forgery that Jordan refused to use for profit. These cards proclaimed a birthday seven years earlier than their actual one. Well, than Hennessy’s actual one. Madox wasn’t sure the rest of them could say they’d been “born.” 

At one point, when she thought too hard about this, she suddenly found herself standing in the bedroom with blood dripping down her knuckles. Three ragged holes gaped in the plaster wall. Madox couldn’t remember putting them there, but her heart sang like she had, and that was proof enough.

June set the bones and bandaged the half-ruined hand, because a hospital stay would have complicated matters. She told Madox to stay out of sight for the next few weeks lest her injury ruin their visual continuity. If Hennessy and Jordan had to pretend they were hurt, painting in front of the parents would become difficult.

Madox suspected that she wouldn’t be missed if she vanished altogether. To Jordan and June, she had never been anything except an inconvenience; to Hennessy, she was an entertainer, nothing more. She wasn’t needed here. No one would care if she disappeared.

So fuck them. She didn’t have to care either. She stomped out of the stifling suburbs, hitched a ride downtown, and looked for a place to fight.

Her complicated identity ruled out most aboveboard places, but she didn’t want aboveboard. She wanted knock-down teeth-out hair-ripping skin-tearing viciousness. She wanted to see viscera pool across a stage.

She found what she was looking for.

There was no way to learn herself, then, not with her hand swollen and her knuckles fractured. But she watched the underground scraps with a hunger unlike any she’d known. It was better than art, better than subterfuge, better than the sound of Jen shitting her guts out. Money exchanged hands between spectators. The betting culture intrigued her, though it didn’t light a gambler’s flame below her skin. She was just curious about what it would be like if people bet on _her._

So she returned after she’d healed, and she learned. She spent her vicious energy breaking noses and snapping ribs. She came home with black eyes and bruised collarbones. It felt good. It felt good like the rage had, in those first confused minutes of her life. She was young and smaller than the competition, but she was fearless, and she was keen to prove herself, and that was advantage enough.

She and Hennessy began to frequent bars. After all, June had ensured that their IDs read twenty-one. They were kicked out of three establishments regardless, the bartenders threatening to call the cops as they giggled and bolted for the door. 

So they planned. They watched online tutorials. They painted each other’s faces until they both passed for college students. Twins, they told anyone who asked, relaxing after a long shift at their shitty shared workplace. The seediest places were too dimly-lit for scrutiny. Hennessy loved the attention of the patrons, but Madox was more interested in breaking the wrists of whichever idiot guy tried to feel her up. She got them banned from more than one place like that, but Hennessy always screeched with laughter, and then they raced outside to escape before an assault charge could stick. Neither of them minded rough-and-tumble conflict. Even if it did ruin Hennessy’s potential hookups.

They nearly fucked it all, though, one night when they piled out of their shared taxi. The problem was that Jen the Bitch Wannabe From Hell was smoking her third joint on the porch. The problem was that Hennessy and Madox didn’t notice; they weren’t watching for her. Why would they be? They were drunk as hell, and their stepmother was usually asleep by nine. Something must have kept her conscious. She hadn’t chugged enough wine to slip into a pretty housewife coma.

So she saw them. Of course she saw them. Hennessy and Madox had vanished without telling Jordan or June of their plans, so there was no one to create a diversion. This was the kind of situation that Jordan and June usually prevented.

Jen was stoned and puzzled, shaking her head back and forth as though to clear the double vision. Madox and Hennessy froze. They both absorbed the danger. They exchanged a glance. Then they scurried around the side of the house before Jen could collect herself, half-diving through the window they’d left open and vaulting up the stairs.

“We have a problem,” Hennessy announced as she entered their bedroom.

Jordan looked up from her easel, flecks of paint in her pulled-back hair, fingers stained with pink and purple pastels. “Oh?”

“We’re drunk as fuck,” Madox explained.

“That’s not usually a problem.”

Hennessy explained the rest.

“Oh, for the love of God,” June snarled as she emerged from the bathroom. She smacked both Madox and Hennessy across the face, once, sharply, and then she stormed downstairs. 

Which, Madox thought, was fair.

From what Madox later heard, she successfully convinced the Step Evil that the weed had been laced with hallucinogens. Just bad luck. Her dealer was forgetful, wasn’t he? Of course he wouldn’t _want_ to fuck her up, but maybe he’d accidentally given her something from his own personal stash -

Madox wasn’t sure why June hadn’t pretended that Hennessy had been with a friend, a very non-identical friend, because everyone looked alike underneath a midnight haze. That seemed a more plausible explanation to her drunk-ass self.

But God bless June for her commitment to the ridiculous. Madox would have broken immediately under interrogation.

“I feel odd,” Hennessy said, suddenly, into the deepening silence.

Maybe one of the guys she’d flirted with had slipped her something. Hennessy always popped at least two stimulants before she got smashed, just to be safe, just to stay conscious. But that didn’t mean a roofie wouldn’t work. It wasn’t like Hennessy made any fucking effort to protect herself when she went out. Madox was always the one who watched her back so they’d get home safe.

Jordan’s gaze sharpened. “Odd how?”

“I feel…”

Hennessy trailed off, but Madox could already see the corruption. A trickle of liquid slid from her left nostril and dripped from her lower lip. Just a nosebleed. A nothing-thing, really. It wasn’t anything. Madox had weathered a thousand bloody noses.

She couldn’t explain the foreboding that tightened in her gut.

“You’re bleeding,” Jordan said, even sharper, like she’d felt the same awful premonition.

Hennessy raised her hand, slow, dreamlike. She swiped at her face with a clumsy movement. She gazed at the liquid smeared over her skin. She blinked.

“No,” she said, and the words were slurred in a manner more pronounced than drunkenness. “No. I’m not.”


End file.
